Japan: Street View’s Missing Streets

The launch early last month of Google’s Street View service in major Japanese cities brought with it considerable controversy and debate among Internet users, particularly with regard to the scope of coverage and lack of local consultation prior to roll-out. Opinions among bloggers were divided — and remain divided — over whether broadcasting detailed images of the country’s public streets and residential alleyways to the whole world is a good thing or not. While that debate has quieted down, another discussion has emerged in its wake, centered on a curious property of the new service that, as of yet, remains unexplained by the company that created it.

One of the earliest bloggers to write about this was tama atTamagorogu [ã‚¿ãƒžã‚´ãƒ­ã‚°], who on August 6th, after taking Street View for a spin and remarking on their surprise at the service’s incredible detail, noticed something funny. While the service was rolled out across 12 cities in Japan, including Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka, the coverage did not appear to be uniform across these areas:

I noticed that there was something strange. While the coverage of city streets is really extensive, there are huge areas that are completely blank. A large portion of ÅŒta Ward, the area where I live, is not in Street View.

Why on earth would they do this? Among all 23 wards [in Tokyo], it seems that only in this area is there such a large blanked-out zone. Considering how wide a scope has been covered outside of [Tokyo's] 23 wards as well, this is clearly not a low-priority area. In aerial photographs, Google blurs national defense institutions, so I suspect that they did this intentionally. I wonder, is there some national security-level installation in this area that they do not want to become easily accessible? The mystery only deepens.

Coverage of ÅŒta Ward [å¤§ç”°åŒº] (Tokyo) in Street View. Follow this link to explore the area directly in Street View.

The problem I’m talking about here is not the hotly debated issue of “what has been shot”. I’m talking here about the opposite. In Google Maps where the Street View function has been activated, roads covered by Street View are indicated in blue and easy to distinguish. By the same token, areas not covered by Street View are also easy to distinguish.

Outside of Tokyo, a well-known large-scale discriminated community [è¢«å·®åˆ¥éƒ¨è½/hisabetsu buraku, or “burakumin area”] (a group from the area has bought a domain and has its own web site, but just to be safe I will avoid citing the actual name of the city and region here) hardly appears in Street View except for its periphery area. There are however many more areas in this city that are also blanked out, and also on the human rights board on 2channel [they are saying] that there is no causal relationship between Google avoiding this area and the fact that it is a burakumin area. Nevertheless, if you know the rough whereabouts of this region, then there is the potential to visualize it on the map.

(For those interested, Sakiyama goes into more detail about the connection to burakumin (éƒ¨è½æ°‘, a Japanese social minority group) in an interesting and detailed follow-up post [ja]. If readers are interested I could translate part of this entry in a separate round-up.)

Sakiyama’s thoughts are echoed in a popular entry by Hatena blogger id:buyobuyo:

At the moment the area supported [by Street View] is still small, so it would not seem that this is the case, but the concern remains. I’ve written this before, but I think this would be a good service if they had thought harder about how to avoid filming people, and if they had limited themselves to business districts and along main roads. By announcing these sort of clear guidelines on what they were shooting, the kind of problems discussed here could be eliminated.

Coverage of ÅŒta Ward [å¤§ç”°åŒº] (Tokyo) in Street View. Follow this link to explore the area directly in Street View. buyobuyo compares the atmosphere of ÅŒta Ward in these pictures to Area 51 in the U.S.

Nishitokyo city is my hometown, but this area does not have governmental institutions, nor are there high-class streets. So it really makes me wonder why this area has been blanked out.

Coverage of part of Nishitokyo [è¥¿æ±äº¬] in Street View. Follow this link to explore the area directly in Street View.

Finally, at the Osaka shi mondai matome site [å¤§é˜ªå¸‚å•é¡Œã¾ã¨ã‚ã‚µã‚¤ãƒˆ], one blogger argues that the connection between blank zones and so-called assimilation districts [åŒå’Œåœ°åŒº] (or burakumin areas) is just a new variation on an old theme: